KIT SKELLY

In the weeks before he stood on the edge of the Leaside Bridge, Kit Skelly wrote frankly about the delusions that consumed him.

One day walking down the street, birds chirped overhead. Then they spoke to him, heckling, taunting him, and hurling insults. Some of the birds, a pitiful few, cheeped in his defence, Kit would remark in a written entry. He continued walking.

“What a life,” he wrote. “The birds were just the beginning.”

Since Kit was diagnosed with schizophrenia in November 2008, following the first terrifying psychotic break that landed him in hospital, his life was a torturous cycle through a broken mental-health system — doctors, psychiatric wards and countless medications — that never truly kept the voices at bay.

“Tortured” is the word his parents used openly to describe his life, as they announced his death on March 9. He jumped from the bridge in the early morning hours. He was 23.

Last spring, Lesley and David Skelly bravely agreed to tell their son’s story to the Star for a series on how Canada’s mental-health care is failing families, and how many are falling through the widening cracks of a disjointed, bureaucratic system.

Mental-health experts acknowledged then, as they do now, the failures in proper diagnosis, adequate funding for community services that supplement endless medicinal trial-and-error, early intervention and swift support for families in times of crisis.

The Skellys, forced to become primary caregivers, nurses, researchers and advocates, believed sharing their story would help bring awareness to the plight of their son and so many others who desperately needed a community to rally around them. They had hope that he would survive.

For a time this winter, they dared believe their sweet boy, with his curled brown mop of hair and big, sparkling blue eyes, was coping. But the words he left behind, a window into his mind that he hid from them, showed the anguish never subsided.

“He was so much more tortured by the voices and demons that were in his head, that he felt like he had no choice (but) to end his life,” said mother Lesley Skelly in an interview at the family’s restored red-brick Leaside home. “He was so tormented. It was just a waking nightmare for him every day.”

The Skellys detailed how their son believed he was living in a virtual world. He existed inside a video game he didn’t have the controls for — and he struggled to take trials of medication that could help stave off hallucinations.

Kit was 19 and a second-year biology student at Guelph University when he had his first psychotic break. He was diagnosed early with schizophrenia and prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant pills that he took every morning and night. For a time, things were relatively stable as he transferred to Ryerson University to resume classes.

But Kit began to resist his medication, resenting the side-effects — weight gain, tremors and lethargy. His parents became the “pill police” as they worked to find a fix to quiet the voices without ridding their creative boy of his motivation.

Last fall, Kit moved into the basement apartment below his older brother Adam, where his parents visited frequently to clean, supply groceries and check on him. Most days he stayed indoors, playing video games.

On a few rare occasions the Skellys treasured, Kit could be coaxed from his lair to enjoy a sushi lunch or spend a few hours working at the family’s plumbing supply business — which they recently sold to focus full-time on caring for their son and seeking out alternative treatments.

“He would make spaghetti for lunch and fish sticks and peas for dinner every night for the past five months,” Lesley said.

They didn’t know then that the thoughts of suicide had already invaded, that an imaginary entity he called the Controller was compelling him to jump off a bridge.

The day before he killed himself, Lesley called Kit to say she was coming over and he asked her to bring his favourite book — Ender’s Game, a popular science-fiction novel he read dozens of times, whose main character is a boy who struggles to find peace and escape a virtual reality. Kit also struggled against what the voices were telling him and what he once knew to be fiction, often confusing his own world with the make-believe on the page.

As a child — born April 21, 1989 as Christopher Skelly, the middle of three — Kit would live inside the books he read. The introverted, quiet boy would often disappear from family gatherings, only to be found wrapped up in a novel or his Game Boy, his family said.

Kit was also intensely creative. With a deft musical ear, he earned his Grade 8 piano certification at a young age and was often drawn to the keys to bang out classic rock ballads. Music became a way to express himself, his family said. Once, after days stuck in a psychiatric ward, he finally sat down in front of the hospital keys and plucked out an uplifting Christmas tune.

Lesley said playing the piano was often a reliable barometer of his mood: “When he didn’t play you knew he wasn’t doing very well.”

Kit stopped playing his guitar two weeks before he died.

“We only found that out through his recent writings that it was severe as it was,” David said.

That Friday afternoon at Adam’s, Lesley enjoyed a beer with her sons before Kit retired to his room.

“I went downstairs and Kit was sitting on his bed and there was a notebook in front of him; he was writing,” she said. “I said, ‘Bye, love you.’ And he said, ‘Love you too.’ And then the next morning at 9:15 the police came and told us he’d jumped off the bridge.”

Kit’s is not the only story to end this way and it won’t be the last.

One per cent of the country’s population lives with schizophrenia — an estimated 350,000 people.

Like Kit, the majority is overwhelmed at a young age, with onset between age 15 and 25 as they become adults and transition into new opportunities: school, work, adventure, love.

His parent’s knew that 40 to 60 per cent of people with schizophrenia attempt suicide. In the end, 10 per cent will die this way, at a rate 15 to 20 times greater than the larger population.

In Canada, 4,000 people will take their own lives this year. In Ontario, there are 1,000 reported suicides annually — although the true number is higher according to the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario. Ninety per cent suffer some form of mental illness.

Last year, the Mental Health Commission of Canada released the country’s first national strategy on mental health, calling on the provinces to increase spending for mental health to $4 billion annually, from 7 to 9 per cent of health-care spending.

That commitment still falls below spending in other G8 countries, said Steve Lurie, executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Toronto branch. Between 2004 and 2011, Ontario invested $16 billion in other areas of health care and only $220 million in mental health, he said.

Meanwhile, families like Kit’s aren’t able to access early-psychosis intervention, supportive housing, connect to crisis teams or mental-health beds, with waits a minimum of several months and sometimes years.

Kit didn’t qualify for some community services under restrictive guidelines — he hadn’t spent the required 50 days hospitalized to be assigned a community-crisis team, for instance

“The gap is that we don’t have enough accessible, available resources,” Lurie said. “This comes down essentially to political will.”

When Kit was suffering, the Skellys were his first and often only line of defence. His parents researched and fought for a type of medicine that could be injected into his arm, which their providers knew little about. He was the first to receive the treatment at Sunnybrook.

Mary Alberti, CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, said there are huge concerns about the lack of support for families like the Skellys.

“We really feel that people still are not talking about schizophrenia and psychosis to the extent we should be talking about it,” Alberti said. “People do get lost in the system. And you’re going to have tragedies for sure. If you can prevent them or avoid them, if the system was better, then that would be much better for everybody.”

In death, the Skellys said, friends, family, and even strangers have rallied.

At the visitation Tuesday, a 47-year-old man showed up after his mother read the obituary notice in the Star.

“I just want to let you know that there’s hope,” David remembered the man told them. “There’s hope for other people. Look at me.”

That moment was empowering, David said, as he and Lesley search for ways to keep telling their story and help others overcome the fear. Two days after his death, the couple found themselves standing on the same bridge their son jumped from, walking the road that would be his last.

“It’s all we’ve got left really to take this forward,” David said.

At Kit’s funeral, packed with 400 people in a bright hall as the snow twirled upwards, dancing outside in the light, the Skellys said goodbye.

“Love you as much as there are stars in the sky, sand in the desert, and water in the ocean,” Lesley said, her voice cracking. Throughout Kit’s short life, she had diligently penned the same phrase into every birthday card, every letter of love.

Lesley and David remember their impish, doe-eyed boy dancing — captured in home movies — his hands finding the rhythm, then his knees, then his whole being. They remember how in the small moments between the real and imagined, the old Kit — artistic, bright, happy — was still there.

And if they couldn’t save Kit, there are still others that need their help.

“When we walk along the street and downtown and we see a guy chattering to himself or yelling out somewhere, it’s different now. We know that that’s Kit,” David said, his stoic demeanour starting to crack. Lesley puts a hand softly on his knee. “That is him. And there’s a person in there that needs love and a hug and help.”